POSSESSED; Crosses That Bear the Past

By DAVID COLMAN

Published: June 12, 2011

IF you are suffering from a surfeit of repressed emotions, why not pay a visit to Midtown Manhattan? The steaming summer heat gives you the perfect excuse to blow your cool with all the unprintable expletives your heart desires.

Or you can bask coolly and vicariously in the unprintably named ''The ------------------------ With the Hat,'' Stephen Adly Guirgis's explosive play about the travails, both funny and poignant, of a man newly out of jail and off alcohol. The poor guy has Chris Rock as his A.A. sponsor: You do the math. (One wonders how they'll deal with the title at the Tony Awards tonight: the play received six nominations.)

In person, sitting and smoking in the cluttered kitchen of his Upper West Side apartment -- the very apartment in which he grew up -- Mr. Guirgis does not swear like a trucker. But he does share with his protagonist a mournful, raw intensity, and is frank about his own struggles with drugs and alcohol.

Still, talk about a man at home with his past: In every cluttered room, he is surrounded by traces of his childhood and parents, both of whom died in the last few years. He's having a rough time parting with any of it. At the same time, he said, ''I don't really have any valuables.''

He does have an attachment to one thing far above the rest: a fine gold necklace with three gold crosses, originally a gift from his Egyptian father to his Irish-American mother, whom he met when she was vacationing in Cairo in the early 1960s.

''Three days after they met they decided to get married,'' Mr. Guirgis said, taking off the necklace to show it. ''They were at the Khan el-Khalili, which is this famous bazaar in Cairo, and he bought her this, and she always wore it. At some point she added this little cross from when she was baptized, and then my father's sister, Athena, gave her this third cross with a blue stone.''

Around 2003, Mr. Guirgis's mother gave him the necklace, and he started wearing it at the time he began dating a woman whose name he declined to give. It was not a placid relationship.

''We got together and broke up a few times,'' he said. ''Mostly because I didn't know how to handle it. At one point, we were breaking up again, and she was demanding to know that I really wanted to break up. And I said, 'Yes.' As soon as the door closed, I knew I made a mistake.''

His campaign to get her back was not subtle. It involved notes, calls, drop-ins and a disastrous rendezvous in London. In a last-ditch effort, he sent her the necklace. ''I knew she'd know what it meant to me,'' he said. ''So I figured, if she kept it, there was still hope. If not ...''

She held on to it. Finally, though, he laid it on the line. ''I said to her, 'You gotta tell me if you still love me.' '' ''And she said: 'I don't. I'm sorry.' '' Eventually the necklace came back.

''I just took it out of the envelope and threw it in my desk,'' he said. ''I didn't want to look at it.''

Not long after, Mr. Guirgis's mother died, and he moved back into his childhood home to look after his father. Clearing out his desk, he saw the necklace.

''I thought maybe it was time to wear it again,'' he said. ''Two powerful women that had such an impact on me -- my mother and my aunt -- are dead, and this woman was, in a sense, dead to me. So now I wear this for me.''

He paused to think. ''I love a happy ending, but sometimes things don't work out,'' he said. ''There's also something in this about surviving something and learning something. And if this scenario comes my way again, if I meet someone, I think I am going to do better.''

If you're going to carry something everywhere, it might as well be hope.

PHOTO: MEMENTO: Stephen Adly Guirgis wears his mother's necklace. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ELIZABETH LIPPMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)